Super Girl

Suffering a serious injury, game designer Jane McGonigal turned her powerful intellect toward saving herself. In the process, she may have found a key to overcoming obesity, depression, and illness, helping us all feel Super Better.

In a ballroom at the Austin Convention Center, game designer Jane McGonigal presents her standing-room audience with a challenge: a massive multiplayer thumb war. "Can we connect every hand in this room?" she asks. This being South by Southwest Interactive, the hipster-geek conference held each spring in the Texas capital, everyone's eager to accept the mission. Grasping the hands of the strangers sitting on either side of me, I summon my long-dormant thumb-wrestling skills. "Does anyone have a free hand?" McGonigal searches the crowd. "No? Okay...go!"

For the next 90 seconds, we're laser-focused, trying to pin down our opponents' thumbs at the same time. The remnants of the competitive zing I experienced during those fifth-grade recess championships still linger: I really want to win. McGonigal, 33, a strikingly attractive blond in a black corset dress and gray knee-high boots, her huge pale blue eyes lightly rimmed in dark liner (she'll later accurately describe her look as "goth warrior princess"), scans the room, triumphant. We must have set a world record for the most simultaneously interconnected thumb war, she announces.

Epic win is gamer parlance for "a big, and usually surprising, success," McGonigal writes in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, her New York Times–best-selling manifesto that justifies the favorite pastime of America's 183 million active gamers and explains the psychology behind the blockbuster gaming phenomenon—a projected $68 billion industry in 2012.

If you still think of the gaming industry as by, for, and about frat dudes shooting at virtual terrorists or pimply teenagers in their parents' basements, addicted to their role-playing lives yet hapless in their real ones, think again: The average gamer's age is 35, and 40 percent are women. Thanks to the boom in online and downloadable "casual" and social games—Peggle, Bookworm, FarmVille—the number of female gamers is skyrocketing. Adult women make up the largest audience for these games, a slice of the industry that brought in $2.25 billion alone in 2007, according to the last major report released by the Casual Games Association.

And if you're one of these casual gamers, hiding your lunchtime Bejeweled addiction out of fear you'll be caught indulging in a gigantic time-waster, McGonigal wants you to rest easy. One of her Big Ideas, laid out in both her in-person appearances and in Reality Is Broken, is that gaming, whether it's Mario Brothers or Monopoly, Guitar Hero or gin rummy, is not escapism. Instead—as she's told everyone from Stephen Colbert to her audience at the 2010 TED (Technology/Entertainment/Design) conference—playing games is one of the most useful things we can do with our time. Using positive-psychology research to back up her theses—with a PhD in performance studies from Berkeley, specifically on "why we're better in games than we are in real life," she has an academic mind that gathers stats and studies like a magnet—McGonigal posits that playing games provokes emotions that make us happy and productive. When we play games of all kinds, she says, we're optimistic, creative, focused, and resilient. We're excited to work hard, and we're not afraid of failure. We're cooperative and collaborative, ready to ally with others.

Another of McGonigal's Big Ideas is that the engaged, inquisitive mind we use when we're playing games can solve real-life problems, and even change the world for the better. After all, she writes, "the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming." But as she told the audience at TED, "That's not nearly enough time playing games. If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, and obesity, I believe we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade."

McGonigal doesn't traffic in the Xbox or Wii, although she plays both. She designs alternate reality games (ARGs), which usually combine real-world and online tasks (and are distinct from role-playing games, in which players assume the identities of fictional characters). McGonigal's ARGs are incredibly strategic and detailed and often encompass intricate narratives; they take place over a specific period of time—from one night to a few months—and each is carefully designed to provoke certain emotions in the players. (A sneaky side effect of our thumb-war collective, McGonigal told us, was to feel goodwill toward our seatmates, thanks to the release of the "bonding chemical" oxytocin into our bloodstreams, triggered if a touch lasts more than six seconds.)

Some of her games are geopolitically minded, like 2007's World Without Oil, in which players simulated life without that increasingly endangered natural resource, with the goal of prompting players to conserve oil, both during and after the game. Others involve off-the-wall antics that, out of the context of a game, might seem bizarre. Players of McGonigal's games have answered mysteriously ringing pay phones on busy city streets (for ilovebees in 2004, her first big splash); danced in crosswalks (Top Secret Dance Off, 2009); practiced a "lost" Olympic sport, developed by McGonigal herself; and road-tripped for hours to locate a secret object (The Lost Ring, 2008, which, peaking with 2.9 million players, boasted the largest community of any of McGonigal's games).

Her latest game, SuperBetter, is a framework to provoke personal transformation in its players, and it has fascinating applications for people suffering from chronic disease, recovering from injuries, or trying to meet a health goal. The game has quests ("do a memory quiz"), allies (a friend who, for example, might make you cookies), "power-ups" (whatever makes you feel better), and "bad guys" (whatever makes you feel worse). SuperBetter will be the initial launch for Social Chocolate, a small start-up that McGonigal joined a year ago as cofounder and creative director, which has been funded by private investors from the advertising, gaming, and academic research worlds. Its goal: creating games "powered by the science of positive emotions." SuperBetter will be beta-tested this summer in preparation for a fall launch (go to ELLE.com/friendswithbenefits to learn more), and it's McGonigal's most personal project to date. The original version was played with pen and paper, and included only McGonigal, her close friends, and her family. It's not an overstatement to say that its intention was to save her life.

Two weeks after South by South­west, as we sit on lounge chairs on the roof of her ­luxury San Fran­cisco high-rise, McGonigal tells me she sees her mission as "not to just flatly say, `Hey everybody, let's play games all the time!' It's saying, `The majority of people are engaged with games; let's understand what this is.' It became clear that, for people motivated by games, these were properties that would be valuable to have in real work, real problem-solving, real life." And if you can't stand games—or can't stand that someone you love is spending too many hours staring at a screen? "It's tremendously helpful to understand what they're getting from that game, so you can create moments like that in the rest of your life," she says. "Even if it's just by understanding, `I need an activity that feels self-motivated and challenges me and that I can get better at.' "

Since childhood, McGonigal has sought out these types of self-motivating challenges, like when she wrote a full-length young-adult novel the summer before ninth grade. But her schoolteacher parents, early Internet adopters who doled out allowances based on the number of books read, actively pushed their daughters in a way that "was both good and stressful," says Jane's identical twin, Kelly McGonigal, who teaches positive psychology at Stanford University and who half jokingly calls their mother "the original tiger mom.... She never treated us like we were gifted. It was like, `You have to work hard all the time.' "

"We believed that you follow their interests, and tried to provide as much opportunity as we could," says Judith McGonigal, on the phone from her home in Moorestown, New Jersey, where Jane and Kelly grew up. "Wherever their creativity led, we followed."

Jane was the natural gamer of the duo, with a competitive nature and a knack for understanding game structure. She spent endless hours on the family's Commodore 64—unlike most kids then, she wasn't interested in Nintendo or Sega, preferring instead the lesser-known mystery and problem-solving "text adventure" games of the era—and both sisters mention a lengthy period when the card game Spit reigned over the neighborhood. "People would sit in a circle and watch Jane play," always emerging the victor, Kelly says.

Jane created her own games too: The basement of their parents' home still has the masking-tape markers of a life-size board game she dreamed up around fourth grade, called Prom Night, and she recalls making her high-school boyfriend play a game she created around major milestones in their relationship, "like, `Here's our first date,' " she says. She's forgotten the details, except that it involved dice: "I just remember my sister saying, `I can't believe you convinced him to sit and play this game with you.' " (That's a hallmark of a "Jane game," Kelly adds. "She gets people to do really strange things—and they feel like that was the coolest thing in the world.") Even back then, Jane says, "I liked organizing experiences for people.... I liked that you could take a bunch of people and they'd have this experience together and get excited. Maybe it's because I was geeky, but I liked that people who wouldn't ordinarily talk or be nice to each another would be on the same team."

Tiger parenting has its advantages: Jane graduated first in her class at Fordham University; Kelly was summa cum laude at Boston University. But Jane's first year in the real world—editing at a dot-com in New York, ruling out law school and publishing—left her feeling a little lost. One day Kelly asked her, "As a child, what did you do that you loved?"

"Making up games and giving motivational speeches," Jane answered. "But that's not a career! Who does that?"

Kelly seemed to be happy at Stanford, so when Jane started to research graduate schools—her after-work hours volunteering as a stage manager off-Broadway had kindled her interest in performance studies—she went west too. While at Berkeley, she took a gig with a fledgling gaming company, working on the Go Game, a kind of urban scavenger hunt with ARG-like elements. She was fascinated by the dynamics of the game: "It seemed to change the players afterwards," she says over gnocchi and huckleberry sorbet at Millennium, an upscale vegan restaurant. "You'd play this game in North Beach, and then any time you came back to North Beach, you were full of optimism and curiosity, going into strange shops and talking to strangers. I thought, Wow, games really stay with you."

She changed her doctoral focus to gaming, and her research into games' ability to create collective intelligence won her conference presentation slots. After writing a major paper on the landmark ARG The Beast, she sent it to Beast lead writer Sean Stewart at 42 Entertainment, and the company hired her to work on ilovebees, a companion to the blockbuster Xbox game Halo 2. "These were collaborative games that were tremendously positive," says Stewart, now at Fourth Wall Studios. "People came from all kinds of places and found themselves in a common cause, uniting together. That's what's always appealed to Jane."

A few years later, the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology journal Technology Review named her one of its Young Innovators Under 35. The award was a turning point. "Most of the other people who won were inventing solar ovens for women in Africa or doing molecular biology to cure cancer, and I felt fairly unworthy," McGonigal says. She'd wanted to work on those kinds of issues, but she hadn't studied engineering or served a stint in the Peace Corps—things that seemed like prerequisites for that kind of work. Suddenly, it struck her: Why not? She decided to leave 42 Entertainment for the future-forecasting organization Institute for the Future, where she would certainly earn less but could work on less commercial games with a more explicit mission to change the world—like World Without Oil. Next came EVOKE, a game for the World Bank Institute that focused on combating poverty and disease in sub-Saharan Africa by teaching young people to become social entrepreneurs and challenging them to suggest social ventures that the World Bank would fund. Fifty of those ventures, says McGonigal, were funded, and some are still in business today.

S. CHOCOLATE, PRIVATE EYE, reads the nameplate on the door at Social Chocolate's headquarters in the Flood Building in downtown San Francisco—a nod to Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, who once worked at a detective agency in this landmark 1904 building. Inside, the office is a stripped-down start-up: two rooms, some conference tables, chairs, laptops, and a printer/fax. On one wall, a large piece of cardboard holds a hand-drawn mockup of SuperBetter.

In early July 2009, on sabbatical from her part-time job at the Institute for the Future and deep into writing her book, McGonigal was picking up papers from the floor of her office in the apartment she shares with her husband, documentary filmmaker Kiyash Monsef, and their beloved Shetland sheepdog, Meche (named after a character from Grim Fandango, the film noir–ish mystery game the couple played together obsessively when they first met). As she stood up, she collided—hard—with an open cabinet door directly above her. The force knocked her right back on the floor. "That wasn't good at all," she said, looking up at Monsef.

"By that night, she was definitely in a fog," Monsef says. In jeans and sneakers, he is boyishly handsome, with thick dark brown hair and a kind of shrugging gait. The couple met in New York at a mutual acquaintance's birthday party; they collaborate on almost all of McGonigal's games. "She was speaking much more tentatively than she normally does," he says. "She had a harder time putting together thoughts and sentences. It was very scary."

It wasn't until a few days later that they realized how not good it was: McGonigal was gripped with vicelike headaches, nausea, vertigo. Her mind felt cloudy, her thoughts discombobulated. Diagnosed with a concussion, McGonigal was told that after a week she'd probably be fine. But a week went by, and the symptoms worsened. She couldn't read or answer e-mail; she was often seized by panic. "If I went into a setting with any kind of stimulation, it was like being under attack," she recalls. We're sitting against square pillows on the wide window seat of her living room, looking out over the Bay Bridge, McGonigal's legs tucked up under her purple floral dress. The apartment is upscale minimalist—cream-colored leather sofa, tall box lamp, telescopes at the ready by the huge window, Xbox hidden away behind a cupboard door. A bronze sculpture—one of the lost rings that that game's players had to find—stands next to the TV. It was "like people were standing next to your ear and screaming and clawing at your brain," she explains. She spent most of her time watching Desperate Housewives and Gossip Girl on her computer. "I'd try to e-mail, but it was incredibly hard for my brain to do it, so I fell off communicating."

For a workaholic and a runner used to clocking 4.5 miles a day, being bedridden was a nightmare. She sank into a depression and even contemplated suicide; she didn't know how long she could stand living that way. "Until I started researching concussions, I didn't know that sudden depression and suicidal ideation [are symptoms]," McGonigal recalls. "I was afraid to go on the roof."

She'd never battled serious depression, but "growing up, I was prone to anxiety," she says. "Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that—feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social interaction, like theater and games. All of the optimism comes out of believing that these hard things are universal. We just have to be there for each other." Years ago, Kelly introduced her sister to Zen Buddhism; both are serious practitioners. Jane also considers herself an existentialist. In her talks, she subtly references both schools of thought. "I think life is really hard and full of suffering, and our purpose is to alleviate the suffering for others," she says. "That's what game designers are good at doing.... I don't want to be perceived as, `Oh, here's someone who's super happy, led a charmed life, and is completely in denial about re­ality.' Especially with SuperBetter—that comes from a place that's raw and real and difficult." But the concussion led to a completely different level of depression than she'd experienced in the past.

When she hadn't improved a month after the accident, her doctor said the next recovery window would be two months out—and if she wasn't better by a year, she might never fully recover. I'm either going to turn this into a game, or I'm going to kill myself, McGonigal thought as she walked home from that doctor's visit with Monsef. "I could see that my problem was social isolation, anxiety, and depression. I'd just written the first four chapters of my book, all about positive emotions and social connection. It was like, This has to be the moment when I rise up and make it all real."

As part of her postconcussion TV marathon, she revisited an old favorite, Buffy the Vampire Slayer—appropriate for someone who loves teen-girl culture. (McGonigal attributes her wardrobe and makeup choices to the show; specifically, Sarah Michelle Gellar in the first and second seasons:
"Badass woman saving the world. But cute and girly.") What if she turned her recovery into a quest with missions, and an epic-win goal to get super better? She'd think of herself as Jane the Concussion Slayer.

"The hero's journey gives you meaning, a sense of battling forces bigger than yourself," she says. "That was what clicked for me. If I can be `Jane the Concussion Slayer,' taking Buffy's ass-kicking, world-saving [story]—if I can bring that feeling to it, I'll be able to give purpose to this." Another big decision: to enlist friends and family as allies. "I knew people cared," she says. "But they just didn't know what they could say or do."

She began to see herself as the hero of her own story and asked her loved ones to do specific tasks to participate in her recovery: Kelly called daily to check in and gave her mini missions ("Just look out your window and enjoy the view"), Monsef gave her points for walking a bit farther each day, and a friend came over weekly to make her laugh. She reframed the triggers that worsened her symptoms (visual stimulation, caffeine) as "bad guys" she needed to vanquish and listed her "power-ups," the things that consistently helped, like playing with Meche. "I started feeling better immediately," she says. Aside from the occasional migraine, she's now fully recovered.

Social Chocolate's version of the game is more formal and detailed, but the basic framework is the same. Players travel through seven missions; the suggested "bad guys" and "power-ups" will change depending on the condition, and users can share ideas via forums. Everything from the instructions to the logo seems crafted to promote hope and optimism in the user. (Players will be asked to provide a Facebook-like status update for their allies, offering two things they're looking forward to; science has shown that anticipating the future can improve one's present outlook.)

But it seems so simple, I say. We've all heard that if you want to make a major change, set realistic goals and gather a support network. "It's grounded in known best-practices," McGonigal acknowledges. "But this is a framework for actually doing them. It's designed to help you tap into your natural ability to be heroic, to rise to the occasion." McGonigal says she wants the game to "revolutionize how we're there for one another."

"Through SuperBetter, your friends will know what you're grappling with that might be hard to articulate," says Lora Menter, Social Chocolate's program manager. "Sometimes asking for help or even knowing what to ask for is the hardest thing."

Social Chocolate is already planning post-SuperBetter games; McGonigal wouldn't be opposed to a game-themed reality-TV show. She's not afraid to think big; she's claimed that her life's goal is for a game developer to win the Nobel Prize. "Games are a platform for engaging huge numbers of people, and to tackle peace, you need to engage as many people as you can," she says. Look at the companies formed from EVOKE: "What if five years from now, those companies are radically transforming education for girls in Pakistan and farming in Nigeria? Somebody could get a Nobel Prize for just one of those things.

"I don't see it as my path, because I'm not the best game designer in the world. I want the best game designers in the world to make games that unleash the power of people to do something extraordinary. I'd like to see people who invent the greatest games of our time—World of Warcraft, Super Mario, Angry Birds—turn to this field. Every game designer should make one explicitly world-changing game. Lawyers do pro bono work," she says, so "why can't we?"